Bail Out the Ugly

Congress doesn't usually need my help finding new economically disadvantaged groups to subsidize with taxpayer cash. The legislative branch has shown its willing to extend lifelines to banks, auto makers and, tentatively, pet owners.

Until recently, pet owners’ flea shampoo and litter expenditures had been their burden alone, leaving fat cats like me to contribute nothing to the actual fattening of cats. No more, if Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a fourth-term Republican from Michigan, has his way. In July, he introduced the Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years Act, which would provide tax deductions for up to $3,500 a year in pet expenses, effectively spreading costs among all households, not just the two-thirds of them that own pets.

Sure, critics will point to the government's record budget deficit, estimated at $1.4 trillion in its fiscal year ended September, and paranoid types will say the government has no business deciding what constitutes a pet, which it would have to do for tax purposes. I say the bill does a fine job of defining pets as legally owned, domesticated, live and not used for business. So no stolen parakeets, befriended timber wolves, Butterball turkeys or circus elephants. (I'm still waiting for a clarification on whether yogurt microbes are "domesticated" if they live in my digestive tract.) And regarding the cost, I'd like to point out that the bill's name anagrams more or less to H.A.P.P.Y. Can you really put a price on such adorable legislation?

That brings me to another burdened group that badly needs Congress's help. We must act now to bail out the ugly.

Consider the latest research on the value of good faces. In a study, scheduled to be published in the academic journal Personality and Individual Differences, 30 women were asked to judge the facial attractiveness of National Football League quarterbacks. The best-looking of them turned out to have the best passer ratings. Think about that. Their pleasant faces must have mesmerized coaches into giving them preferential instruction since childhood. Another study published this month in Sex Roles found that graduate students could predict which female chief executives had the highest pay and biggest company profits just by judging pictures of their faces – more for the appearance of leadership ability than beauty, per se, but that's close enough. An October paper from the Quarterly Journal of Political Science already should have caught Congress's attention. It found that attractive Senate candidates get more votes than plain ones, all else held equal.

Most alarming of all, a study scheduled for publication in the Review of Economics and Statistics finds that unattractive people commit more crimes than lovely ones. Citing prior studies that link ugliness with low pay, the researchers theorized that, "a labor market penalty provides a direct incentive for unattractive individuals toward criminal activity."

I call on Congress to draft the "Spend Tax-dollars on the Unattractive Now to Nix Income Neglect and Grief Act." S.T.U.N.N.I.N.G. would address the problem on several fronts, providing tax deductions for beauty supplies and cosmetic procedures while authorizing a $3,000 credit for hard-featured individuals, and $6,000 for difficult-to-look-at couples.  As for that extension of the $8,000 perk for house buyers, let's amend it with a Homes for the Homely incentive. And based on that Senate candidate study, maybe some campaign face reform. We might also combine S.T.U.N.N.I.N.G. with H.A.P.P.Y. to provide benefits for owners of ugly pets.

We'll need to judge attractiveness fairly to avoid abuse of the system by the borderline good-looking. A government takeover of AmIHotOrNot.com, where visitors rate strangers' looks, should suffice. That will probably require a minor expansion of eminent domain powers and perhaps a quick rewrite of the Constitution. But can we really afford not to act?